Sound and No Sound

What a sunrise I witnessed! Long, subtle, at turns dramatic and quiet. It took me by surprise as I was making my bed to the sing song litany of the news on NPR through KRZA in Alamosa, CO. Today, it seems, the nation with Obama at the helm, is walking in rhythm. And it may be announced later that the plans are set to close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. The stock market hadn't opened yet, but the futures were bright. For me, a third straight night of good sleep has left me feeling almost right, good energy but still one or two physical oddities that I'm going to have to check out.

But I digress. A glance over my right shoulder revealed wavy layers of blueberry and strawberry jam clouds over the bluebeard foothills to my east. Ms. Moon plucked a sad note at her apex, above the colorful fray, pale, shivering in the old navy of night, frail to the bone, not enough left to hang on to. She stayed up there, visible, even as the powdery aqua mists drifted up the Rio Grande Valley and tried to hide her. And all of this, the moon's acquiescent curtsy and the rumble of curlicue clouds below starting to form a circle of light above the sage still prisoner to the crusted snow, each plant a being stuck in an endless advance to the north buried up to the chest and stymied, moving only along the tips in circular salutes, all of this happening without sound. I went outside and jumped up on the adobe wall, scanning like a periscope risen out of the deep, and what I noticed more than the building light and the Close Encounters kineticism of the sky, was the embracing calm, the courtesy of the cold to remain unstirred, the quiet from a billion years ago settled into this vast valley, not even the emanating hum from the core of things that you sometimes hear out on this desert. All action blended into nothing. And again, similar to that sense, that memory in the deep, dry ice blue snow of the foothills that me, my molecules, atoms, the parts that reflect as me, can be let go, can be dropped into the snow, collapsed, quieted with the quiet, melded, meshed, infused, suffused, disappeared into a sleep that lasts billions of years. That is solace. That is love.

I compare it to yesterday, when I hiked Divisadero in the morning, still icy, the cold sounding in my mouth and ears like a high pitched piano note. But the sun was climbing quickly and the frozen mud and snow crunched under my boots like eggs and bacon frying on an iron skillet. Each bend brought the sun onto my face and I stretched out my neck, pushing my head, eyes closed as close to the source as I could, just like the trees surrounding me. I had no water, but I knew that the sun, with the snow around me, could divine what I needed. And when I got to my sacred spot and relieved myself in the triangular hole that is still there, no longer 3 feet deep, more like a foot, I stopped and looked at Taos Mountain. In my prayers for guidance, gratitude, health and abundance, I could not help but hear my body vibrating with the ramble and machine buzz coming from town. It filled up my bowels, insinuating itself in such a way that it can't be ejected. I stood and listened, let it fill me, squinted my eyes when I was startled by the gurgly groan of an 18-wheeler moving down Highway 68. It hit me in the solar plexus, in the ass, in the places where an amped up bass hits you. But this thing sounded like a pig in a poke, sniffling, grunting, snarfling through the muck. And then the supersonic sound of a jet, splitting the air, a doppler-atic push of baritone, in and out, coming and going, the sound circling around my head. This sound used to bring smiles to my face growing up because it reminded me of being at baseball games at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, where the planes from LaGuardia Airport flew over every few minutes. But not now. Now it made me feel like a lost, useless part of the big machine, rooting through the valves and chambers to find my purpose. Too many things moving and making unnatural sounds. It made me feel as if man did not trust the movement that already existed, the sounds of the world, and he had to create his own, movement, and sound. And that, in itself is ok, that can be art, that can be part of the planet jiggle, but there came a point of recklessness where convenience and luxury (whatever that means) replaced the art that requires the spell that requires the sound, and no sound, of the core of the earth, and the walking of the mountains, and the doip and thunder of water. And even writing this I feel like a useless, discarded part of a machine and I don't trust that machine and within it I do not trust myself. That's what I heard, saw and felt yesterday on the mountain.